Does Watching Fictional TV Series Increase Social-Cognitive Skills?

Many current theories propose that engaging in stories in which human interaction and interpersonal relationships are addressed might train social-cognitive skills (theory of mind, empathy), but research has rarely focused on TV series as a prevalent audiovisual form of stories and on narrative processes (i.e., transportation and identification) that might moderate story effects. We conducted two naturalistic online studies in which the participants at home and at their convenience watched either three episodes of a fictional TV series that featured human interaction or a nonfiction documentary that featured no human interaction. In Study 1, 201 participants completed a theory-of-mind task and an empathy questionnaire before and after watching the TV stimuli. In Study 2, 165 participants completed the same two questionnaires and a media-based empathy questionnaire before and after watching the TV stimuli and again one week later. In addition, transportation and identification were assessed after watching the TV stimuli. Results of both studies indicate that viewers’ social-cognitive skills show no significant improvement after watching three episodes of fictional TV series compared to nonfiction documentaries. An additional small lab study with 46 participants mirrored the findings of the naturalistic online studies.